Looking For The $0.69 Songs On iTunes

from the gotta-dig dept

Last month, we pointed out that some of the music industry folks who actually "get it" were getting worried that when iTunes launched its variable pricing offering, labels would focus much more on jacking up prices to $1.29, rather than finding songs to offer at $0.69. Aaron Martin-Colby points out that this appears to have been quite an accurate fear. Gizmodo went looking for $0.69 songs and had a lot of trouble finding any. $1.29 songs, however, were quite easy to find. Once again, looks like the record labels are more focused on squeezing fans rather than giving them a real reason to buy.

Well...

then don't buy from iTunes. Why do people pay (or don't pay) to download lackluster quality mp3's when you can get the CD, which includes the album artwork, and rip it in any quality you want? Storage space is getting cheaper. People can have a large library of lossless media and get a 60gb iPod to put it on. but, i guess that not everyone is an audiophile.

Re: Well...

Because not all of us want to have 5 million CDs cluttering up their homes, for no audio gain.

I'm sorry, but iTunes' AAC format, and even MP3 have *no noticeable* loss of quality over CDs. Get over it and stop imagining "quality" when there isn't any.

Also... I refuse to buy an entire CD when there's only one or two decent songs on it.

I'm disappointed that there are no (so far) cheaper songs on iTunes. I agree that the $1.29 might be just enough to drive people to the "free" alternatives. .99 is nothing, $1.29 starts to actually look like money :/ Perception is everything in the sales business.

However, what they *should* do is now remove the charge for making a ringtone from these "premium" priced songs. That might almost be worth the higher price... saving .70 on the ringtone.

Re: Well...

AAC

Right now the only reason I buy CD's is because I can rip them to any format I please. I rip a lossless copy to my archive, and a copy at the highest bit rate mp3 for my working library. If I need a cd for the car, I burn one. If I want to refresh my mp3 player for the gym, I copy files to it (currently using my phone for this). IMO having that flexibility justifies the purchase of a CD.

Re: Re: Well...

I would disagree that increasing the pricing by 30 cents for most songs will drive people away; the biggest pricing hurdle by far is going from free to $0.01, and iTunes did that years ago. There are millions of people with their iTunes accounts all charged up or linked to their credit card that are already willing to pay a dollar a song; $1.29 per song isn't a huge stretch from there.

Now, increasing prices by 30% is more than enough to make sure I don't buy any more songs from iTunes, I only use my iTunes money for iPod games and apps, really. Although I do agree with you that if they sold the $1.29 songs as DRM-free and you can make free ringtones. But nooo, that would be actually adding VALUE to your product, rather than just increasing price. And companies don't like to do that, right?

Amazon!

So, you don't like DRM and apple charges too much (shocking!) but you think that it might be time to stop 'pirating' all your music of peer-to-peer services?

Amazon.com - they sell unprotected Mp3's - I've never seen one that cost more than $0.99. You usually get a per song discount if you buy a whole album AND they have a whole mess of very real very free Mp3's.

Re: AAC

U make no sense. You buy a CD and do all those things. Which is still possible by simply replacing the buying a cd part, with downloading the actual songs from the cd. (which I'm sure are only a few u actually ever listen to).

So u have a CD sitting around collecting dust.... and u still spent more than me...

iTunes Blows Chunks

Last year I bought over a thousand dollars worth of aacs or whatever the hell they are from iTunes. I dutifully backed them up to my external drive. I was a GOOD BOY.

When I bought a CHAKA KHAN song that was CLEARLY torn from one of those 60 minutes of disco hell CDs, I let them know. They told me it was the original. I wrote back, it is not. The real version is from this album, from 1979..just listen. It certainly ran longer than 1:57.

I was told it was the original version. They credited me .99 and told me to shut up. Well, they didn't really tell me to shut up.

Then my external drive had "issues". I lost about 20% of my music. I told iTunes. They all had a good laugh I bet, but I figured, why not ask. It can't hurt. They provided me an URL regarding redownloading music. Essentially GFY. I understood their policies, but I took a shot.

No fkg way am I going to spend that much again to replace everything. I am a BAD BOY now. I do not feel any guilt getting an album for .98 from um, another store.

eMusic, which I also belong to, lets you re-download your songs as long as you are a subscriber. For some reason, eMusic thinks that those downloads are mine, even after I screw up and lose some of them, or get a new computer.

The RIAA and iTunes can SMA, especially with their invisible price tiering.

I remember when compact discs came out and you could not find one for less than $17.99. Remember when they came in those long boxes so people couldn't steal them? Yep, $17.99 for a disk that cost them 4 cents to manufacture. These days the Big 4 Record Companies don't have anyone to screw anymore, at least en masse - that's why they are so cranky.

Amazon MP3s

Amazon MP3s come at 256Kbps. Even the guys that hang out on the Hydrogen Audio forums spending all their time tweaking the LAME.dll codec, CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE ON ANYTHING between 256 and CD.

Like some other posters said, it's all about value. If I like most of an album and find it cheap at Second Spin or something, I buy it that way (no way I'm paying $18 for 12 songs). If the album (or a "best of" EP) has a good discount on Amazon, I might buy that. Otherwise, I just buy individual tracks.

I then burn everything to CD immediately and put the physical disk in my CD storage rack just in case. I also back up all my songs regularly to another computer. Am I worried that I might lose something if I had to actually re-rip the songs from the CD? A little, but not when I am paying .50 a song instead of 1.50, because then I could re-buy a single album if it sounded too bad (but it won't).

News Flash

These days the Big 4 Record Companies don't have anyone to screw anymore, at least en masse - that's why they are so cranky.

Yeah, it used to be making something good and bringing it to market was fulfillment enough.

All the record companies can live in their 60s and 70s bubble. It's intentionally complex, because it isn't about market-based economics. It's about control. Hell, all the companies aren't even publically traded. Legally speaking, they are structured as subsidiaries, LPs or LLPs under the parent company.

This is interesting because it shields them from the SEC, regulatory, and public scrutiny a publicly traded company would require. Transparency is not required, and they don't even have to produce a balance sheet, yet they all get together and want to overtake our intellectual property system.

Re: Re: Well...

"I'm sorry, but iTunes' AAC format, and even MP3 have *no noticeable* loss of quality over CDs. Get over it and stop imagining "quality" when there isn't any."

I am not an audiophile at all, and I can tell you this isn't remotely true. In fact, the quality difference is quite noticeable in several situations. Music with a lot of fine detail, such as acoustic music, and music with a large frequency range tend to suffer the most. I have factory speakers in my car, and I can tell a difference between original CDs and CDs burned from MP3s. If you use a very high bitrate (320kpbs), MP3 does surpass the audio quality of my speakers, but iTunes uses (or at least used to use) 128kpbs, which is clearly inferior to CD.

And yet ...

... I saw three articles this morning saying that there are more $.69 than $1.29 songs on iTunes (OK, somebody finds that 50%+1 are less than $1.29 and another person can't find more than 2 out of 100K items??). There will come a point where the cost of these things will exceed the willingness of the public to pay for them and then the public will look for other sources. Then, the music publishers will once again bitch until iTunes creates a higher price tier so that they can charge more to make up for the lost sales because people went elsewhere to get music when iTunes was too expensive.

Re: Amazon MP3s

Glad you are the authority on what other people can hear. I no longer have to trust my own ears. What a relief.

MP3s are inconsistent, and they are dependent on the encoder. With a good rip at 320kpbs, I personally can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD, but I have crappy equipment and even crappier hearing. Bit rate does not tell the whole story, however, as I have heard 320-kpbs bitrate rips that have very noticeable artifacts and/or distortion. I don't really know how anyone can screw a rip up that bad, but they do.

There is another issue, as well: transcoding. If I want to change formats for some reason, going from one lossy codec to another degrades quality very quickly. CDs offer the ability to archive a lossless source from which any format can be ripped without transcoding degradation. FLAC downloads offer the same thing, but I don't know of any store that offers them. I am an album listener, not a single listener (I generally never use shuffle mode), so the extra cost of buying a full album does not bother me.

I read that some songs that are sold for $0.69 come from albums where every other song is sold for $0.99. There's really no savings here. May as well buy the same album for $5 bin at a music store of some sort.

lala.com

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Re: Re: Well...

@Ariel
Please shut up if you don't listen to your audio. There's a very noticeable difference between 128kbit mp3 and 192kbit mp3. Once my entire library was at least 192kbit, 256 and 320 became a major improvement over 192. *no noticeable* for you sounds like a personal problem. Perhaps you should invest in REAL headphones, not the apple bullshit. Or REAL speakers or monitors, not your laptop speakers.

I'm sorry, but you lost every bit of credibility by stating we're imagining quality.

I download every single song, on the other hand.
Why? Well, aside from the major time savings of waiting for the record companies to ship me the promos of songs I may or may not like, EVERY SONG on P2P today, at least on the network I partake in, is at least ~200VBR mp3 (VBR sounds very good even at low bitrates if a good algorithm is used. I can rarely tell a difference between a good ~200kbit VBR and 320kbit CBR), but a good majority of them are 256-320kbit VBR and CBR mp3s.

itunes wants to charge me over a dollar per song for sub-p2p quality music? It'd be p2p quality if we were still living in the days of kazaa and morpheus, but the world has moved on.

Re: Re: Re: Well...

I've met quite a lot of people in my time who's hearing wasn't as good as they thought it was. I mean, even though I know MY hearing is very good, I took one of those high frequency hearing tests, and it was obvious that I'm now 30 years old, and not 20 any more judging by the frequencies I couldn't hear...

Hearing ability is extremely variable, and the amount of people who don't fully realise how bad their hearing is, is probably going to increase for quite some time - (especially given the volume at which people listen to music these days - I personally can't stand anything loud and bass-heavy - it gives me headaches/makes me ill :( ).

I've had people saying that it's impossible to hear differences between various types of audio for a while too - from high bit-rate MP3's to WAV's etc..

The funny thing, is that I always could - though I think my DAW was probably the main reason for that - (good sound-card/headphones (DT100's)/monitors etc.).

One person I ran into reckoned that there wasn't even a difference between 16 and 24-bit audio files!! :-O

Honestly, stop whining about having to pay for music. Is $1.29 really that much to pay for a song you really like? You aren't forced to buy the whole album. Also keep in mind the monster inflation we are going through, all prices are increasing, say bye-bye to the dollar menu soon...

more evidence of major label incompetence

MP3 downloads cannot replace this revenue stream. Never will. Variable pricing is stupid and is simply a stop gap.

I use the money I used to spend on CDs to see more concerts and interesting new bands. Hopefully my money is going to the artists.

But more and more artists are being conned or coerced into signing 360 deals (i.e. label gets more tour and merch revenue). The good artists are starting to wake up and are dropping their lazy and exploitive labels.

Don't nickel and dime your fans. Respect them and enrich their lives with quality music.

Other services...

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you care about music that's not pushed by major labels (and why not give it a try if not?), you can't go too far wrong with independent services like eMusic and AmieStreet. Both have unique pricing models where tracks vary from being free (all new additions to AmieStreet and a free daily download / occasionally free albums on eMusic) to being cheap (maximum of around 50c/track on an eMusic sub, 98c on AmieStreet).

For major label content, they need to stop being retards. For example, because my credit card billing address is not in certain countries, I'm actively refused the chance to buy music through cheaper mainstream services like Amazon and Play. Since iTunes is too expensive (and doesn't work with my preferred PC setup), if that's my only choice for buying music then I don't bother. Also, I don't care myself, but if they did offer a choice of music quality & format, they might find their sales increasing that way as well.

I believe a lot of the record industry's problems would end if they just realised that international borders do not exist online and that they could vastly increase their business by allowing everyone to buy their products. Of course, this would involve changing distribution deals and end price gouging of people in "richer" countries, but right now they're losing a lot more than they realise.

Why lossless matters (aka why I won't pay for AAC or mp3)

The AAC post above already mentioned this, but the responses to it seemed to miss the point by focusing on the CD purchase which is currently the only legitimate way to get a lossless encoding of most music.

When you rip to a lossless format like FLAC, you can then transcode to *any format you like* without losing any additional audio quality beyond that lost by the format you are transcoding to. If your "original" is in a lossy format like AAC or MP3 though, then if you transcode it to a different format you will get a lower quality result because the file will not only be missing the signal information thrown away by the format you are transcoding to, but it will also be missing the signal information that was never included in the lossy original.

lossless

Every try listening to classical music on an MP3 at even a high bitrate? It's ugly. On the flipside, if you just listen to music in your car mp3 is fine since road noise, engine noise, other noise from the car itself, and the surfaces in the car (lots of upholstery & glass) just destroy any fidelity in the music.

@ARIEL: "Also... I refuse to buy an entire CD when there's only one or two decent songs on it."

Hey, all the bands I like fill their CD's with good songs, with barely a 'filler' to be seen (or heard). Dunno what shit you're listening too there but talent and musical integrity are generally a prerequisite for a band to actually be GOOD.

Re: Re: Well...

Plus, I for one, get tired of seeing the label on the cd scream YOU ARE A CRIMINAL at me for having the audacity to buy it. Seriously, anyone else buy the Lonely Island's Incredibad CD and see the two piracy warnings on it, at least as large as the text for the name of the cd? Calling your a scumbag asshole pirate? Thats why I rarely buy new music these days.

Re: The link between the Occult and Crappy Music

Re: Re: AAC

Moron, let me spell it for you: all the audio files that can be downloaded have been heavily compressed. Once compressed the quality will remain the same (miserable) no matter the way you are going to reencode it.

I am basically the only one left in my group of friends who downloads music the "old fashioned" way... by PAYING for it. But now, with these price increases, I'm switching over.
I saw a quote from apple somewhere that said that they didn't think the price raise would stop people from buying the hot songs... well it stopped me. I haven't purchased any songs since the price raise. I'm getting them all from other sites.

Re: Re: Well...

You, Ariel, shut the hell up why don't you... You have no idea of how cd's quality is superior over limewire and itunes, etc downloads... Simple mp3s do not capture the true sound to cd's plus it's called buying a shelf to put some cd's on you cheap bastard. To my opinion, having the jacket and booklet of a cd is very interesting to look at and read. If you knew music better, you'd know this and you'd know that there isn't only 2 decent songs on a cd. You probably only like to hear the ones that make the hits cd, but there is more to that. Cd's normally have a theme to them to, which is interesting. You should pick some up, pay up the price to the cashier and listen up you scum. Cd's are just better deuchbag.